This translation was completed in approximately 1810 or 1811, making it of the same general timeframe as the novels. According to Matthews and Everest, this is Shelley’s only translation from French, and he “tried to widen its nationalism with a more universal revolutionary appeal. Thus, ‘contre nous’ (3) is rendered ‘Against thy rights’; ‘nos fiers guerriers’ (26) becomes ‘the arm upraised for Liberty’; and ‘La France’ (38) becomes ‘Our Mother Earth’.”228 Tolstoy would agree with Shelley’s approach, for he feels that singing patriotic songs (even ones such as The Marseillaise, which do not glorify but curse “all tsars and kings and *invoke+ destruction upon them”) is harmful because it supports a “government’s
ambitious and mercenary aims” resulting in “a renunciation of human dignity, common sense, and conscience by the governed, and a slavish submission to those who hold power”. For Tolstoy, “Patriotism is slavery” and the antidote is “in the action of the mind and in its clear expression”, something Shelley dedicated his life to.229
The poem is significant for the opening stanza presages Laon and Cythna: Haste to battle, Patriot Band,
A day of Glory dawns on thee! Against thy rights is raised an hand – The blood-red hand of tyranny! See! The ferocious slaves of power Across the wasted country scour And in thy very arms destroy The pledges of thy nuptial joy,
Thine unresisting family. (ll 1-9)
‘Slaves of power’ are destroying ‘nuptial joy’, again uniting revolution with the wedding night, or a union of lovers. In stanza two, Shelley asks “For whom is forged this hateful chain, / For whom prepared this slavery? / For you” (ll 16-18). (One is reminded of Hemingway’s novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, inspired by John Donne’s famous meditation, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in
mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”)230 This
demonstrates Shelley’s stance, which would be expressed in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ and ‘Song: To the Men of England,’ that people by their own actions and compliance help to bind themselves in the chains which others put on them. For example, in ‘To the Men of England’ are the stanzas:
228
Longman1:158-160.
229 Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays, trans. Aylmer Maude (London: OUP, 1936), 468, 517, 532. 230
John Donne, “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation 17,” in The Norton Anthology of English
Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells – In halls ye deck another dwells.
Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see The steel ye tempered glance on ye. With plough and spade and hoe and loom Trace your grave and build your tomb, And weave your winding-sheet – till fair England be your Sepulchre. (ll 25-32)231
This is a sentiment Tolstoy would reiterate concerning British India:
The oppression of a majority by a minority, and the demoralization inevitably resulting from it, is a phenomenon that has always occupied me and has done so most particularly of late. . . . The reason for the astonishing fact that a majority of working people submit to a handful of idlers who control their labour and their very lives is always and everywhere the same – whether the oppressors and oppressed are of one race or whether, as in India and elsewhere, the oppressors are of a different nation.232
The imagery of chains and slavery is familiar to the Gothic, and ties expressly back to Verezzi from Zastrozzi and to Laon of The Revolt of Islam or Laon and Cythna, as well as to several of Robert Burns’ poems. A particularly beautiful one is ‘The Slave’s Lament’, which deals with the feelings of a slave captured in “sweet Senegal” (l 1), who was “Torn from that lovely shore, and must never see it more” (l 3 & 5), where “streams for ever flow” and “flowers for ever blow” (l 9 & 11). It ends with the lament, “And I think on friends most dear, with the bitter, bitter tear, / And alas! I am weary, weary O” (ll 15-16 & repeated as a refrain in 17-18).233 A more famous poem of Burns’ sums up the situation concerning outward manifestations, rather than inner feelings:
Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled, Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to Victorie!
Now’s the day, and now’s the hour; See the front o’ battle lour;
See approach proud EDWARD’S power— Chains and slaverie! Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward’s grave? Wha sae base as be a slave?
Let him turn and flee! (p 395, ll 1-12)
231
Longman3:277-280.
232 Leo Tolstoy, “A Letter to a Hindu”, Part I, (1909; Project Gutenberg, Ebook #7176, 2004), 4,
http://www.gutenberg.org/file/7176/7176-h/7176-h.htm (accessed 20 August 2012). 233
In stanza three, Shelley criticizes “hired soldiers” (l 25), something which Saint Juste was against too, although he became bloodthirsty as the French Revolution wore on, and was finally executed himself. In stanza four, it is the kings who have created a “parricidal plan” which “At length shall meet its destiny” (ll 34-5). As usual, this seems to be turning things on their head, for parricide is the killing of a father or mother by a child, or the killing of a head of state or of the church. In this case, the kings themselves are committing parricide, not by murdering another head of state in war, but by the vast numbers of deaths which are suffered by their own people in their quest for power; their killing of the fathers of the nation. Burns also offers a sardonic commentary on this, entitled, ‘Thanksgiving for a National Victory’:
Ye hypocrites! are these your pranks? To murder men and give God thanks! Desist, for shame!—proceed no further;
God won’t accept your thanks for MURTHER! (p 540)
Graphic cannibalistic imagery appears in Shelley’s translation of the French national anthem (as it does in Laon and Cythna), with lines from the fifth stanza, “Chase those unnatural fiends away / Who on their mother’s vitals prey / With more than tiger cruelty” (ll 47-49). This shows Shelley’s use of cannibalism as a metaphor very early in his career. Stanza six is a passionate calling to Liberty, “thou more dear than meaner gold” (l 52) and her victory over tyranny. It is a translation which is in keeping with the themes of the Gothic and of Shelley’s vision, and again, of Burns’ ‘Scots, wha hae’, though Shelley would make this one encompass not only Scotland but Mother Earth, and not only Scots, but all man and womankind:
Wha, for Scotland’s King and Law, Freedom’s sword will strongly draw, Free-man stand, or Free-man fa’,
Let him on wi’ me! By Oppression’s woes and pains! By your sons in servile chains! We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free! Lay the proud Usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberty’s in every blow!—